Efficient material logistics are critical in controlling costs and schedules in the construction industry. However, manual material handling remains prone to inefficiencies, delays, and safety risks. Autonomous forklifts offer a solution to streamline on‐site logistics, reducing reliance on human operators and mitigating labor shortages. This paper presents the development and evaluation of ADAPT (Autonomous Dynamic All‐terrain Pallet Transporter), an autonomous off‐road forklift designed for construction environments. Unlike structured warehouses, construction sites pose significant challenges, including dynamic obstacles, unstructured terrain, and varying weather conditions. To address these challenges, our system integrates AI‐driven perception with traditional approaches for decision making, planning, and control, enabling reliable operation in complex environments. We validate the system through extensive real‐world testing, comparing its performance against an experienced human operator across various weather conditions. Our findings demonstrate that autonomous outdoor forklifts can operate near human‐level performance, offering a viable path toward safer and more efficient construction logistics.

Automated vehicles allow to adapt new parking concepts, which have the potential to increase the parking capacity significantly. Thereby, the abilities to assign optimal parking spaces to the vehicles and to perform shunting operations are systematically utilised. In this paper, the typical parking order with spots of constant width is replaced by a loose parking order with variable width. In this way, the width of each individual vehicle can be considered, which leads to an improved utilisation of the available space. Despite this improvement, first simulation studies without shunting operations under realistic conditions did not show the expected results. Therefore, an optimum strategy for shunting operations is deployed. As the optimisation is computationally challenging, a heuristic method is proposed which shows similar results as the optimal solution. A substantial increase in the parking capacity of up to 12% for a commercial parking garage is achieved, where no constructional modifications are necessary.

Leveraging gesture-based controls within a remote interface for automated material handling operations presents a promising avenue to optimize experience in outdoor environments. We present a gesture-based interactive system designed to facilitate collaboration between a human operator and a semi-autonomous forklift in material handling processes. Our interface supports commands that include starting the forklift, defining the loading/unloading area and the amount of pallets that need to be transported. We tested and compared the proposed solution to a touch-based User Interface in a field study to explore its effectiveness and identify potential challenges for implementation and adoption in industrial real-world settings.